'House of the Dragon' Keeps Noticing It Sucks to Be a Woman

August 14, 2024

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 5 of House of the Dragon Season 2.

You wouldn’t want to be a woman in Westeros. For anyone who didn’t glean as much from all the rape, incest, and forced marriage in Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon made it more obvious than ever in a first season where every other episode featured gory, fatal, or otherwise traumatic childbirth. In Season 2, we’ve seen the royal Targaryen clan descend into civil war instead of accepting the late King Viserys I’s named heir, his daughter Rhaenyra, as sovereign.

As that war began to take shape, in the season’s first half, Dragon gave us a brief reprieve from the constant reminders that it sucks to be a woman in this alternate-universe Middle Ages. It wasn’t that the female characters were relegated to the background or that gender ceased to play a role in their fates; the show simply stopped clobbering us over the head with an idea it had already exhausted. But that idea came roaring back with the force of Vhagar the she-dragon in Sunday’s fifth episode, “Regent.” And while I hate to complain about a series making an earnest attempt at feminist consciousness, the heavy-handedness with which it incorporates that ethos has yielded some pretty rough TV.

The episode opens with the freshly widowed Sea Snake and Rhaenyra, who’s now down a fierce warrior, a dragon, and a loyal kinswoman, mourning the valiant death of Rhaenys, a.k.a. the Queen Who Never Was, in the battle at Rook’s Rest. The massive severed head of Rhaenys’ dragon Meleys—another Strong Female (Dragon) Character!—is carted around King’s Landing for the benefit of subjects so hungry, they’d rather feast on her meat than rejoice in her slaying. The Green faction is spinning these casualties as a victory, but in truth, it seems that Rhaenys and Meleys have died for nothing in a fight that barely advanced either side’s cause.

The real bemoaning begins at Rhaenyra’s now all-male small council, where she’s forced to question Ser Alfred’s “willingness to give me deference in a time of war.” When he tactfully reminds her that “the gentler sex heretofore has not been much privy to the strategies of battle or their execution,” her reply is withering: “There has been peace in our lifetime. You’ve seen no more battles than I have.” But it doesn’t solve the problem of her advisors’ insubordination—or their reluctance to send her into battle at a moment when the Blacks desperately need dragon riders. You'd think that as queen she would have final say in the matter, but their sexism has apparently activated Rhaenyra's own insecurities as well.

“They would make me queen, but they wish to keep me here, confined,” Rhaenyra complains to her unlikely confidant, Mysaria, lamenting that Viserys “did not prepare me to fight. If I had been a son, a sword thrust into my hand the moment I could walk—instead, I was given my father’s cup, taught the name of every lord and castle between Storm’s End and the Twins, but not the difference between hilt and foible.” It’s like Dragon’s version of America Ferrera’s famous (and equally redundant) Barbie monologue. Truly, the contradictions inherent in being a 21st century working mom have nothing on those that come with being a queen, a wife, a mother, and a dragon rider in this fantasy world. “The path I walk has never been trod,” Rhaenyra reminds us.

Meanwhile, at King’s Landing, her best friend turned bitter rival Alicent is having small-council problems of her own. Aegon has returned from Rook’s Rest flame-broiled in his Valyrian steel armor but still technically alive. Alicent wisely suggests a regent to fill in during what promises to be, at best, a long recovery. She assumes those allies who supported her when she fulfilled that role for her sick husband will be happy to have her back. But apparently war changes everything. Now, they patronize her: “You played your part admirably at a time of peace,” but Aemond is “the obvious choice.” In case anyone doubts the council’s sexism, one advisor informs his peers: “The dowager queen is a woman.” (How many dowager queens are they likely to have ever met who aren’t?) Even her lover Ser Criston Cole backs Alicent’s awful son.

The man in Rhaenyra’s life isn’t exactly the wind beneath her wings, either. Still brooding at Harrenhal, Daemon has become increasingly unsatisfied in his role as marginalized king consort and has begun to present himself, rather than his wife, as the Blacks’ leader. (This delusion is bolstered by his gratuitous X-rated fantasies of sleeping with his long-dead mother, who in Daemon’s visions declares him her favorite son. As if uncle-niece incest wasn’t creepy enough.) “The people who support her will not be led by her. They look to a man for strength,” he tells his new best buddy Alys Rivers, because when it comes to women in power, every man on this show shares the same brain. “When I take King’s Landing, Rhaenyra is welcome to join me there and take her place by my side, king and queen ruling together.” How big of him.

So, wouldn’t you know it—and in a callback to their abortive secret peace summit a few episodes back—Alicent and Rhaenyra have taken very different paths in pursuit of the Iron Throne but are now bumping up against very similar Iron Ceilings. It’s almost like we’ve got a patriarchy on our hands! Alys spells out the moral of the episode, thuddingly obvious as it is within the first 15 minutes, when she reminds Daemon (who can’t be bothered to care about the rape and infanticide being committed under the Blacks’ banner) that “in the name of power, it’s the weak and the women who must endure.” Slim as her chances of getting through to him seem, viewers of Dragon and Thrones have already heard this lament a dozen times.

The sentiment is fine. What’s exasperating is that showrunner Ryan Condal—like David Benioff and D.B. Weiss before him, in the second TV incarnation of a Song of Ice and Fire franchise conceived by George R.R. Martin—never gets past the observation that, in a male-dominated society, women suffer. Repetition doesn’t make that notion any more profound; it just makes an audience feel condescended to. The effect is as though these male storytellers keep re-reading the Wikipedia entry on The Second Sex and proudly summarizing its simplest observations for us as if those ideas hadn’t already penetrated the culture. (“Regent” was written and directed by women—Ti Mikkel and Clare Kilner, respectively—who, after pushback from fans and critics, are more plentiful on Dragon’s creative team than they were on Thrones. Their work in fleshing out the episode’s tiresome premise isn’t the problem.) Female viewers, in particular, might wonder what’s so revelatory about confronting us, over and over, with an elementary fact of our lives.

What’s missing is texture, insight, depth, variety. Misogyny comes as no surprise, ever, but fascinating female characters—which Rhaenyra and Alicent certainly have the potential to be—experience it differently and respond as individuals. That is what makes them both entertaining and illuminating to watch. From Mad Men’s Peggy Olson to Jessica Jones to Michaela Coel’s Arabella in I May Destroy You, the most memorable women on television aren’t defined by the horrible things that are done to them but by the choices they make. Even Game of Thrones had gender-nonconforming women, like Arya and Brienne, to balance out the Sansas and the Cerseis and the Daeneryses.

At least Rhaenyra’s final move in “Regent,” goofily apt as it is, of deciding to use her historical knowledge to identify more potential dragon riders, leaves me with some hope that we’ll see her do more than fret about sexism for the remainder of the season. Her circle of trust also includes another promising character, Baela, who may have just succeeded at bringing her grieving grandfather, the Sea Snake, back into the war room after her grandmother’s death.

Yet by putting Daemon and Aemond—two essentially identical warriors with identical second-son chips on their armored shoulders, despite a few decades’ age difference—on a collision course, as this episode does, the show shifts focus from its richest characters to its broadest ones. I’d be shocked if both men survived the season. But how much time will House of the Dragon waste putting the women in their place, again and again, before that?

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